Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Has Been Released | What’s New

Almost a year of development for the new Red Hat release since the earlier stable release Red Hat 7.4. Now, the final stable release Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is now available to download. The new release addressed several new major security issues, integration of Ansible automation, performance improvements, additional KVM virtualization support for more IBM systems.

Security on Red Hat 7.5

Additional security improvements to cloud and remotely hosted systems that can more securely unlock Network Bound Disk Encrypted devices at boot-time like removable USB storage devices with LUKS encryption. So, it won’t need a manually interaction from your side during the boot process. Along with a new package “clevis-systemd” Clevis pluggable framework which allows administrators to set automated unlocking of LUKS-encrypted non-root volumes at boot time.

Integration of OpenSCAP Security Content Automation Protocol to Red Hat Ansible automation software, which enhances the ease of automating the remediation of compliance issues and enables administrators to more efficiently deploy policies across their environment.

Improved time synchronization using an addition of failover with bonding interfaces for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Spectre And Meltdown Detector is available on Red Hat laps which support detecting CPU vulnerabilities for Spectre and Meltdown on Red Hat 5 until the latest stable release Red Hat 7.5.

Performance on Red Hat 7.5

Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) kernel module is included to Red Hat 7.5 which used to save disk space, reduce replication bandwidth and compression of primary storage.

Distributed File System (DFS) was previously supported in SMB version 1 and now is supported in SMB 2 and SMB 3.

A better performance for DAX file system and ext4 file system improvements through quotacheck utility which directly scans ext4 file systems metadata instead of analyzing each file on your disk.

Registration is required and it’s a trial for 30 days if your don’t have a valid license.

Centos 7.5 Expected Release date

If you are wondering when the free community supported release of RHEL 7.5 will be available. According to a post on CentOS forum regarding the release data of Centos 7.5 stating that The rebuild process of Centos 7.5 has already started and expected to be available soon. I am quoting “TrevorH” post.

The rebuild has already started and when all packages are built and have been tested they will be available via the ‘CR’ repo which is installed by default on all machines but disabled. There will be a notification once CR is populated. That process usually takes days (or perhaps weeks) and is significantly quicker than waiting for the iso images to be built/tested/released.